The Pattern

A Window Pane

During Covid, I worked in a nursing home. We locked down quick. Masks everywhere. No visitors. Residents were disappearing into their rooms.

I started coordinating window visits. Families outside, residents inside, a pane of glass between them. As a logistics ninja buy-in from staff who were already overwhelmed and a lot of improvising made it a success.

We kept going until the lockdown lifted. Doing the work was mine. The memory was theirs.

We Just Kept Going

I started a Young Life club with 5 kids. No budget, no infrastructure, just a handful of us who showed up every week.

Over the next several years the program grew to 200. Not because of a strategy document. Because we noticed what each kid needed and did something about it, one week at a time.

One System

When I joined Capital Square we had 86 employees and no shared way to work. Excel, Word docs, handwritten notes, whiteboards - everyone had their own system, which meant silos and screaming down the hall.

Tasked with finding a solution, we landed on monday.com. For the first time, people could see the bottlenecks. They could collaborate without chasing each other down.

The work didn't change. The visibility did. That turned out to be the thing.

Already There

A vendor came in with all the bells and whistles. I thought: I could just do that myself.

So I did. I mapped the problem and built a working prototype in a week. The tool didn't change the information. Just how fast it could be found.